The question of which chilli to have in my omelette yesterday was easily answered by having both; my breakfast packed quite the punch, coupled with a quarter of an onion and 2 eggs, salt and pepper, but not the lego man, he’s just for scale, in fact he’s an international measurement for small to medium objects, which, I’ll be honest, the hunger for is growing. The number of times (in the past obviously) I’ve seen a mushroom in a field, taken a photo and shown it to someone, only for them to question the size. Well no more, pop a lego man (or woman/ monster/ robot) in your pocket and bring it out in these situations, it provides a healthy recognised  baseline for all sorts of Photo-Size quandaries.

But this isn’t about lego men, there is a broader philosophical question in play today, the question of what are we doing here? A question debated and argued over for millennia, and one I have no idea how to answer, unless its about me in which case the answer would probably be to muck about and have a laugh, love my family and friends and dog (not carnally) and generally try to enjoy myself as much as I can while spending all my money on records and unnecessary distractions. What can you do?

But then I’ve stumbled across another question recently which has been playing over and over in my mind and could possibly be answered with input from others. That question is…

“What am I doing here?” the same but different, because this relates to my job, and what am I doing here, really, what – am – I -actually – doing – here?

For the past 5 years or so this has become increasingly unclear to me. I’m good at what I do, I help people out, solve land disputes, help folk to understand what they own, and proof of property ownership leads to a sense of wellbeing right? But there are other aspects of my job (don’t ask, I’ll not tell you) which has become increasingly confusing to me. We are asked by our bosses to provide certain stuff, to add it to the massive database we as a company have, but to what ends? I have no idea what the data I am collecting is used for, by whom and to do what. When I ask my superiors what are we doing this for, I’m met with scowls and have a black mark put against my name for being “negative”. Or some might say curious as to why I am doing what I am doing and for what purpose, and the stuff I am doing is used by whom for what? This seems to me to be a natural state of being; to ask for context of our actions dictated to us by our people leaders (a term I do not subscribe to, we’re not in North Korea) in this little corner of this big world of ours. My sent emails are full of questions to managers and trainers which no doubt sit unopened in their mailbox. An irritating itch overshadowing their cloud of statistical Alphabetti spaghetti. To address the questions would be to unjumble the letters to spell out “I have no idea what I’m doing either” And for senior management to realise that they have no answers to my questions would be to admit their own ineffectualness and shortcomings; their own adherence to standard operating procedures of which there is no sensible background. Their own realisation that what they are doing is bonkers, but this is why they become middle managers, they don’t ask questions, they do what they’re told. Come year Zero I’ll be first in the pit, shovelled in by the yes men and women.

When ever I ask in meetings, “why are we doing this?” their standard pronto reply is: whom we are doing this for, never why. The whom being some amorphous blob. The why, surplus to requirements, we just do, ok?

Which leads me neatly back to my question, What am I doing here? And the answer right now, is I’m sitting on my arse, listening to records in the lounge when I should be sat at my work desk doing something for which I have no reasons as to why!